Review: EVGA E-Geforce 8800GTX KO ACS3 Edition graphics card

An overclocked beast of a graphics card

No stranger to overclocking, EVGA has unleashed its latest monster - the 8800GTX ACS3 Edition.

As you might have guessed from the name, it's based on Nvidia ’s Geforce 8800GTX, which is an already blisteringly fast GPU.

Not content with the normal clock speeds, EVGA has upped both the core and memory speeds and added an impressively quiet cooler as well.

The matt black ACS3 (that stands for asymmetric cooling system 3) heat sink and fan make an already huge card even bigger, giving the 8800GTX ACS an almost brutal appearance.

The card is 275mm long, so it's worth checking your case's dimensions before purchase.

The cooler covers the whole board, but access to the two PCI Express power connectors hasn’t been restricted in anyway. Another large heat sink sits on the rear of the card.

As standard the core clock of the 8800GTX runs at 575MHz, but EVGA has upped this to a whopping 626MHz. The 768MB of GDDR3 memory runs at 1GHz (2GHz effective) instead of the default speed of 900MHz (1.8GHz effective).

In 3Dmark05, this EVGA card mustered up a hugely impressive score of 17,027 at the standard resolution of 1,024x768, which currently sits it at the top of the pile. At the same resolution, Far Cry ticked along quite happily at 126.53fps (frames per second).

If you're interested in buying a card of this calibre, you're not going to waste time at low resolutions such as this, but even when we pushed the resolution right up to 1,600x1,200 (the native resolution of most 20in TFTs), it still managed an excellent 14,677 in 3Dmark05, while Far Cry ran just a smidgen slower at 126.44fps.

Finally, it’s good to see a graphics card that comes in a sensibly sized box - EVGA has opted for one that isn’t much longer than the card itself, unlike some manufacturers who like to stick their cards in boxes that almost take two hands to carry.

The card can be bought for a whopping £469.99 at Overclockers - softening the blow slightly is EVGA's 10 year limited warranty that comes as standard.

See full performance results for EVGA E-Geforce 8800GTX KO ACS3 Edition graphics card
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